The Assault Part 15

It is November, 1914. Britain is waking, but is far from awake. Nearly everybody and everything are proud to be "as usual." The Fleet has been able to secure but one action with the Germans--Beatty's smas.h.i.+ng blow at the Kaiser's cruiser squadron in the bight of Heligoland. A great trophy of the engagement is in hand--Admiral von Tirpitz' son, watch-officer in the Mainz, a prisoner in Wales. For a month and more the war has been raging furiously in the west all the way from the Alps to the North Sea. Antwerp is taken, after a farce-comedy attempt at relief by levies of raw British naval reserves. Joffre is at sanguinary grips with the "Boches" in the Aisne country. The twelve or fifteen miles of British front in the northernmost corner of France and that patch of Flanders not yet in the enemy's hands is the scene of ceaseless, desperate combat. Jellicoe's dreadnoughts and destroyers take part at intervals in the grim battle for the channel coast. Ostend has fallen.

The German objective farthest west is now clear. The Berlin newspapers head-line the tidings from Flanders "the Road to Calais." Major Moraht in the _Tageblatt_ acknowledges that the campaign for the base from which Napoleon essayed to invade England is "a matter of life or death"

for the Germans. Sir John French and the remnant of Belgium's little army steel themselves for a stone-wall defense. Again and again they keep the frenzied enemy at bay. Have you ever seen Harvard holding the Yale eleven on the five-yard line three minutes before the call of time in the last half, with dark gathering so fast that you could hardly distinguish crimson from blue? Do you remember Yale's ferocious first, second, third, yet always vain, attempts to batter and plunge her way through Harvard's concrete, immobile phalanx? If you do, and if your red-blooded heart has tingled at some such spectacle of young American bulldoggedness, which can be seen West as well as East, in the North and in the South, just as commonly as in the New Haven bowl, you will be able to visualize, infinitesimally, the t.i.tanic grapple around Dixmude, Ypres and the Yser in the b.l.o.o.d.y days and h.e.l.lish nights of October and November, 1914. "The Watch in the Mud" was the way German military critics paraphrased their national anthem, to describe the situation in Flanders, for the Belgians had now flooded the region contiguous to the Yser Ca.n.a.l, and the Kaiser's legions, in their breathless thrust for Calais, were fighting in mire and slush to their boot-tops. More than one company of _Feldgrauer_ was ingloriously drowned.

The British were engaged in precisely the operation for which their temperament best fits them--"holding." The German attack rocked against them remorselessly, giving neither a.s.sailant nor defender rest or quarter. But the bulldog "held." He was mauled unconscionably and bled profusely. Thousands upon thousands of his teeth were knocked out, and he was half-blind, and limped. Yet he "held." Winter had come. Men lived in trenches which had been merely water-logged ditches, but were now frozen into rock. The German eagle, hammered, of course, no less cruelly than the bulldog, was still screaming and clawing, in his mad desire to cleave a way to Calais. But, mangled and scarred as he was, the bulldog barked "No!" He had set his squatty bow-legs, disjointed though they were, squarely across "the Road to Calais." There he intended to stay. It could be traversed, that road, only through a welter of blood which, regardless as German commanders are of the cost when they set themselves an objective, gave the General Staff at Berlin furiously to ponder.

I have already intimated that Britain all this tempestuous while was rubbing her eyes, but was only partially open-eyed. It was not altogether Britain's fault. The immutable Censors.h.i.+p still gave the public no real glimmer of the history-making struggle going on almost within ear-shot of the chalk-cliffs of Dover. Throughout the entire month of October, four weeks as crammed with death and glory as in all England's martial history, Sir John French was permitted to take the public into his confidence but on one single occasion--and that, a dispatch dealing with operations six weeks old! For its news of the heroic deeds and Spartan sufferings of the greatest army it ever sent abroad, the British Empire was compelled to depend on stilted French _communiques_ and the fantastic or irrelevant narratives of an official "eye-witness at British Headquarters," who was allowed to bamboozle the nation for months before his flow of mediocrity and piffle was choked off by disgruntled public opinion. England was fighting her greatest war in Cimmerian darkness. Casualty lists, terrible in their regularity and magnitude, kept on coming, but of the coincident imperishable triumphs of British sacrifice and courage, not a word. One's _Ill.u.s.trated London News_ and _Sphere_ printed depressing double-pages weekly, filled with pictures of England's masculine flower killed in action "somewhere in France" or "somewhere in Flanders." But of the manner in which their precious lives had been laid down, of the price they had made the Germans pay for them, not a syllable. If by accident some correspondent or newspaper secured the account of an engagement, which ventured so much as to hint with some picturesqueness of detail how Englishmen were dying, the Press Bureau guillotine came down on the narrative with a crash which taught the offender to mend his ways for the future.

Under the circ.u.mstances it was not surprising to hear well-founded reports that recruiting was falling off. In the clubs men said that Kitchener's "first half-million" was in hand, but that men for the second five hundred thousand, for which the War Office had now called, were holding back to a disappointing, and even disquieting, degree.

Meantime the popular ballad of the hour was, appropriately, Paul Rubens'

"Your King and Country Want You"--"a women's recruiting song," as its sub-t.i.tle runs. Its opening verse and chorus tell their own story:

We've watched you playing cricket And every kind of game.

At football, golf and polo, You men have made your name.

But now your country calls you To play your part in war, And no matter what befalls you, We shall love you all the more.

So, come and join the forces As your fathers did before.

CHORUS

Oh! We don't want to lose you, But we think you ought to go.

For your King and your Country Both need you so!

We shall want you, and miss you, But with all our might and main We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you, When you come back again!

These words, in prosaic type, look ba.n.a.l. Their appeal seems trite.

Yet rendered to plaintive melody by such an operatic artist as little Maggie Teyte, they went straight to men's hearts. They must have sent thousands upon thousands of cricketers, footballers, golfers and poloists--that is a cla.s.sification which takes in pretty nearly all Englishmen--into khaki and training-camps. But the growing insistence with which the walls and windows of Old England were plastered with recruiting posters--even entire front pages of newspapers were now employed to advertise that "Your King and Country Need You"--indicated that Kitchener's army was not being built up yet by the desired leaps and bounds. Obviously the war needed some other kind of advertising than even the accomplished Mr. Le Bas could give it. It was not strange that the enthusiasm of Englishmen, cheated of the chance to know what was really going on at the front, was beginning to find expression in other directions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Greeting the Kaiser (in helmet) the day he declared Germany "in a state of war," July 31st, 1914.]

It was not magnificent, for example, but it was natural, that Englishmen should, in all the circ.u.mstances, reveal a very materialistic pa.s.sion to "capture Germany's trade." Denied the opportunity of "enthusing" over events at the seat of war, they proceeded to dedicate themselves energetically to the task of eliminating the Germans as a factor in the markets of the world. A profound book on the subject appeared--_The War on German Trade_, with the sub-t.i.tles of "Ammunition for Civilians" and "Hints for a Plan of Campaign." My old friend, Sidney Whitman, the distinguished author of _Imperial Germany_, dignified it with a preface.

England had not entered upon the war "in a commercial spirit or with a commercial purpose," he said, "yet it behooves her to seize and hold fast the ripe fruit which has dropped into Englishmen's lap--as a first incident in the clash of nations." The volume had frankly been published, explained Whitman, "with the purpose of stimulating the English manufacturer and the English trader to seize the opportunities thrust upon them by the war."

Then, as the Censors.h.i.+p, as callous to criticism and abuse as if it were a sphinx, still insisted that Englishmen must fight and die in the dark, as far as their kith and kin were concerned, patriotism at home found vent in a crusade against the Germans still at large on British soil.

They numbered thousands. They were a distinct and undeniable danger.

In days of peace they spied patriotically and flagrantly, thanks to John Bull's easy-going, guileless toleration of the stranger within his gate.

Personally I never believed that the German waiters and barbers in the Savoy or the Carlton, and their myriad of _confreres_ elsewhere in the country, were the advance guard of the German army of invasion in disguise. Nor did I imagine (as I actually made a very British friend once seriously believe) that Appenrodt's restaurants in the Strand and Piccadilly were in reality masked commissariat-stations of the Kaiser's General Staff. Nor could even so persuasive an authority as William Le Queux, author of _German Spies in England_, convince me that every German resident who kept homing-pigeons, owned a country-place near the East Coast suitable for wireless, or got drunk on the Kaiser's birthday in the Gambrinus restaurant in Gla.s.shouse Street, was a paid member of the Berlin secret-service. Most of these stories made me smile as broadly as the "star" rumor of the war--the story that seventy thousand armed Russians had been "actually seen" by Heaven knows how many veracious Britons sneaking across England from Newcastle to Southampton, on their stealthy way from Archangel to the Western allied front.

Yet it was palpably not the hour for German subjects, any number of them of military age and ardor, to be at large in England. So Britain, in a tardy manifestation of self-preservation, began to arrest and intern the Kaiser's hapless subjects, who hitherto had suffered no impairment of their liberties except detention in the country, compulsory visits to the police, and restriction of movement (except by special permission) to an area five miles from their domicile. The German is far too much of a patriot to be trusted to do as he pleases in a country with which his Fatherland is at war. He never forgets that he is a German _first_, and a stock-broker earning commissions in London, a barber taking English tips, or a waiter spilling English soup, afterward. It is always _Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles_ with him. He may not have made a profession or habit of writing home to Berlin or Hamburg, Cologne or Breslau, Kiel or Wilhelmshaven, what he noted of interest at Aldershot, Portsmouth, Dover, Woolwich, or Sheerness, or what his English friends might from time to time tell him of interest at the Admiralty or the War Office. But it was "bomb-sure," as the Teuton idiom rather appropriately puts it, that if ever a British state secret fell into Herr Apfelbaum's hands on the Stock Exchange, or into Johann's in the "hair-dressing saloon" of the Ritz, or into Gustav's at the grillroom of the Piccadilly, that morsel would sooner or later find its way to Germany. When one considered that Englishmen of the highest cla.s.s--one even said the King had a German valet!--were attended night and day, in their homes, their clubs, their offices and their favorite "American bars," hotels, grillrooms, cafes and restaurants by Germans, with eyes to see and ears to hear, it was small wonder that an irresistible cry was sent up before the winter of war had advanced very far, that these "enemy aliens" should not be merely ticketed, labeled and superficially watched, but placed behind barbed-wire, with British sentries on guard.

And so it came to pa.s.s that Mr. McKenna, Home Secretary, whose reluctance to intern the Germans gossip absurdly ascribed to his "German connections," finally ordered "the enemy in our midst" to be rounded up.

Not all of them were at first taken. Thousands remained at liberty.

The British are a patient and a trusting clan.

It was not only the acknowledged German subject in Great Britain who was the object of the anti-Teuton crusade. The naturalized German, in many cases the holder for years of a certificate of British citizens.h.i.+p, was made to feel the blight of the wave of pa.s.sion sweeping over the country. Naturalized Germans have won in England wealth and eminence outstripping even the heights to which they have climbed in the United States. In the preceding reign they were the bosom companions of the Sovereign. King Edward's intimate circle contained the Cologne financier, Sir Ernest Ca.s.sel, and another Prussian native, Sir Felix Semon, was His Majesty's Physician Extraordinary. In the "City,"

London's Wall Street, German financiers almost dominated the picture.

Baron Schroeder (naturalized only within a few hours of the outbreak of the war) was so great a power that citizens.h.i.+p was practically thrust upon him as a measure of vital British self-protection. Sir Edgar Speyer, like Ca.s.sel a member of the King's Privy Council, and a Baronet besides, was not only a City magnate, but controlled London's vast system of surface and underground traction lines, including the omnibus service; yet his English counting-house was a branch of a parent establishment in Frankfort-On-Main. These were a few of the outstanding names among the "Germans" in high place in England. They by no means exhausted the list. Domiciled in this country for years, they had, while openly maintaining sentimental relations with their Fatherland, played no inconspicuous role in British affairs, economic and political.

Any number of naturalized Germans were married to British women and were fathers of British-born families. Scores of their sons were already wearing King George's khaki in Kitchener's army. Sir Ernest Ca.s.sel had given five thousand pounds to the Prince of Wales' National Relief Fund.

Yet rumor shortly afterward had him locked up in a traitor's cell in the Tower of London! No matter how acclimatized these naturalized Germans had become, no matter how long they had been British subjects--in many cases their t.i.tle to that distinction was half a century old--they found themselves under a ban. They were not physically maltreated. Their windows were not broken. Men did not spit in their faces. They were permitted (like the rest of the British) to do "business as usual,"

except the stock-brokers, who were invited to keep off 'Change. But they were a marked cla.s.s. If they ventured to visit clubs in Pall Mall or St. James Street, to which they had paid dues for years, they were confronted with notices reading:

+-------------------------------------------------+ Members of German or Austrian nationality are requested, in their own interests, not to frequent the club premises during the war, and British members are asked not to bring to the club any guests of enemy nationality. +-------------------------------------------------+

Or, if the naturalized German, no matter whether his boy had just fallen at Ypres or not, went to his favorite golf-club of a Sat.u.r.day or Sunday, he received a greeting to the same effect. The virtue of tolerance, a prized British quality, was vanis.h.i.+ng from the face of these war-ridden isles.

The anti-German fury in England claimed an early victim and a s.h.i.+ning mark--His Serene Highness Vice-Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, who, as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, was practically in supreme control of British strategy at sea. Prince Louis is a native-born Austrian, and although he had been a naturalized British subject and attached to the Royal Navy since 1868, and in 1884 married into the British Royal Family by wedding his own cousin, Princess Victoria of Hesse, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, a campaign inaugurated and mercilessly prosecuted by the aristocratic _Morning Post_, led, on October 29, to the Prince's resignation. Public opinion unreservedly approved the disappearance from a post, from which it was not too much to say the destinies of the Empire were controlled, of a man who was brother-in-law of Prince Henry of Prussia, the Inspector-General of the German Navy, and of the Grand Duke of Hesse, one of the Kaiser's federated allies. The same spirit of "Safety First" which sent the German barbers and waiters to camps in Frith Hill and the Isle of Man dispatched Vice-Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg into official oblivion. n.o.body actually distrusted his patriotism. But England was in no humor to run even remote risks. He had to go. Satisfaction over Battenberg's retirement was only slightly modified by a later revelation that it was Prince Louis himself, and not Mr. Churchill, as universally supposed, who was chiefly responsible for the mobilization of the British Fleet just before the outbreak of war in consequence of having "commanded the s.h.i.+ps to stand fast, instead of demobilizing as ordered."

November was a month of kaleidoscopic sorrow and joy for the British.

It began in gloom, with Turkey's entry into the war and the inherent menace to Egypt which that event denoted. Then came the great naval action off Chili, with first blood to the Kaiser in the only regulation stand-up battle in which British and German wars.h.i.+ps had so far met.

The sinking of Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock's flags.h.i.+p, the cruiser _Good Hope_, and her companion, the _Monmouth_, by Admiral Count von Spee's cruiser squadron, with the loss of one thousand four hundred precious lives, was a bitter blow. Lord Charles Beresford, under whom Cradock had once served, told me that his death was a more serious loss to the British Fleet than a squadron of cruisers.

It was a depressing beginning for the First Sea Lords.h.i.+p of Lord "Jackie" Fisher, who succeeded Prince Louis of Battenberg. Churchill was still First Lord of the Admiralty--what we in the United States should call Secretary of the Navy--but Fisher, as First Sea Lord, was in practical control of everything connected with the actual activities of the Fleet. The First Lord of the Admiralty's business is to get s.h.i.+ps for the navy. The First Sea Lord's task is to man, arm and fight them.

Fisher lost no time in angry remorse over Cradock's disaster. He set about to repair it. He applied forthwith the "Fisher touch." He ascertained that it was Rear-Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton St.u.r.dee, Chief of the War Staff, who had been chiefly responsible for dispatching Cradock's squadron to waters in which it would have to meet a German force superior in both tonnage and gun-power. Whereupon Fisher ordered St.u.r.dee to place himself at the head of a squadron which was to find and destroy von Spee, and not come back until it had done so. St.u.r.dee "delivered the goods" with neatness and dispatch. Almost a month later to the day--it is a fortnight's journey from British waters to the Southern Atlantic even for twenty-seven-knot battle-cruisers--he carried out Fisher's imperious orders. On December 8 Cradock was gloriously avenged. Von Spee in his flags.h.i.+p, the _Scharnhorst_, together with the sister cruiser _Gneisenau_ and the smaller _Leipzig_, was sent to the bottom off the Falkland Islands, and the remaining units in the German squadron, the _Dresden_ and _Nurnberg_, were accounted for later.

Britain breathed easier. The bulldog breed in her navy was still to be relied upon. Everybody instinctively felt that there was any number of more St.u.r.dees and s.h.i.+ps and guns and sailors ready to do equally invincible service for England if the Germans would but give them the chance von Spee had offered at the Falklands.

Spirits which had drooped when Cradock was lost were revived ten days later by the most welcome piece of naval news the British people had had since the war began--the destruction of the Kaiser's champion commerce-raider _Emden_ by the Australian cruiser _Sydney_ off the Cocos Islands and the capture of her intrepid commander, Captain von Muller, and many of his crew. The _Emden_ sank seventeen s.h.i.+ps and cargoes worth eleven million dollars before her career was ended. But von Muller won universal renown and even popularity in Great Britain for his daring, "sportsmans.h.i.+p" and gallantry to vanquished merchantmen. Germans do not appreciate such a spirit, and do not deserve to be its beneficiary--the utter lack of the sporting instinct in the Fatherland is responsible for that unfortunate fact--yet if von Muller had been landed a prisoner of war in England and could have been paraded down Pall Mall, he might have counted confidently on a welcome which Englishmen customarily reserve for their own heroes. Here and there in London protests were raised against the encomiums which almost every newspaper, and for the matter of that almost every Englishman, uttered in praise of von Muller's vindication of the n.o.bility of the sea, but the overwhelmingly prevalent opinion was that he had "played the game"

and, pirate though he was, deserved well of a race which still holds high the traditions of the naval service.

Ever-changing and stirring were November's events--the capitulation of Germany's prized Chinese colony of Kiau-Chau to the besieging j.a.panese; Lord Roberts' tragic death in the field among the soldiers he loved so well, the Indians who had come to Europe to fight Britain's battles; the still victorious advance of the Russians in East Prussia, though Hindenburg's smas.h.i.+ng blow in the Tannenberg swamps had been delivered many weeks before; the honorable acquittal of Rear-Admiral E. C. T.

Troubridge, commanding the Mediterranean cruiser squadron, on the charge of having allowed the German cruisers _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ to slip through his meshes into Constantinople--the Admiral had applied for a court-martial, to clear himself of a grotesque accusation that a relations.h.i.+p with the captain of the _Goeben_ had induced him to let the Germans through. But all these things combined left no such indelible impression on my mind as the Lord Mayor's dinner at the Guildhall in the city of London on the night of November 9. That function, the inauguration of the new chief magistrate, is celebrated in British history as the annual occasion on which leaders of the State promulgate some great new line of Governmental policy--a national keynote for the year to come. The Guildhall dinner in the midst of Britain's greatest war was sure to be of immemorial significance, and my heart beat high with antic.i.p.ation when Lord Northcliffe a.s.signed me to attend it and record an American's impressions of England's most august feast.

Guildhall was the scene of a famous flamboyancy by the Kaiser not so many years ago, when he had talked about the comparatively firmer consistency of blood compared to water and consecrated himself to the cause of Anglo-German peace and friends.h.i.+p. I was keenly anxious to hear what sort of sentiments would echo through the century-old sanctuary of the City to-night, with men like Asquith, Balfour, Kitchener, Churchill and Cambon, the French Amba.s.sador, as the speakers.

I looked forward to an evening sure to be crowded with imperishable memories. I was not disappointed. At midnight when it was all over, I sat down to write "an American's impressions" for _The Daily Mail_, and as they were exuberant with the freshness of mental sensations just experienced and have not cooled in the sincerity of their utterance in the long interval which has supervened, I make no apology for repeating them herewith verbatim:

"When I became the joyful recipient of an invitation to attend last night's Guildhall banquet I reveled in the prospect of a feast of Baccha.n.a.lian pomp and pageantry. I expected to witness nothing much except a Lord Mayor's 'show,' translated into Lucullian environment, a riot of food, drink, cardinal robes, gold braid, gold chains, gold sticks, wigs and the other trappings of mayoral magnificence. I came away utterly disillusioned, for I had spent three hours in what will live in my recollection as the Temple of British Dignity.

"Those stately Gothic walls, whose simple groups of statuary which tell of Wellington and Nelson and Beckford; those amazingly non-panicky war speeches of your Romanesque premier, your grim Kitchener, your--and our--Winston Spencer Churchill, and your polished Balfour, all made me feel that I was tarrying for the nonce within four walls which, if they did not envelop all the great qualities of the British race, at least typified and epitomized them.

"Guildhall is dignified by itself beyond my feeble hours of description.

I have never trod its historic floors before, but I have the unmistakable impression that it has taken on fresh dignity to-day for the words which were spoken in it yestereve. I was about to say, in the idiom which springs more naturally to the lips of an American, 'for the words which rang through it.' Words were not made to 'ring' through Guildhall. They would be ludicrously out of place. An American political spellbinder, no matter how silver-tongued, would pollute the atmosphere of London's civic shrine. Its acoustic qualities, which I should think were not faultless, are intended for exclusively such oratory as put them to the test last night.

"Guildhall's tone is the tone of Mr. Asquith--'practicing the equanimity of our forefathers, the fluctuating fortunes of a great war will drive us neither into exaltation nor despondency.' I thought that striking phrase of a brilliant peroration British character in composite. It was more than that. It was Guildhallian. The cheers for the Premier, like those for Balfour, Churchill and Kitchener, would have been more vociferous in my country. But my country is not British. We are not devoid of dignity, I hope, but we have no Guildhall."

It was left to other hands to report in detail the speeches of the Prime Minister, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of War.

Each uttered phrases of golden significance. Mr. Churchill was evidently still his ebullient self, although he had not yet fulfilled his promise of September that the German navy, if it remained in port and refused to come out, would be "dug out like a rat from a hole," nor had his now acknowledged personal responsibility for the fiasco of the Antwerp naval expedition perceptibly staled his infinite buoyancy.

"Six, nine, twelve months hence," he declared, "you will begin to see the results that will spell the doom of Germany." I had never heard "Winston" speak before, but I understood now the charm of his personality and the attractiveness of an oratorical style made even more magnetic by the suggestion of a combined stammer and lisp. "In spite of its losses," he continued, "our Navy is now stronger, and stronger relatively to the foe, than it was on the declaration of war." Asquith read his speech, and Kitchener was about to do the same, but Churchill, youthful, vibrant, tense, spoke extemporaneously, and the consequent effect was indubitably the most striking of all the oratory of the night.

Lord Kitchener, in khaki and with a mourning band on his arm, was redolent of strength and impressiveness, but when he rose, clumsily adjusted a pair of huge horn-rimmed reading gla.s.ses, and began to chant his carefully-prepared "speech" in monotone from ma.n.u.script, he was far less convincing, and certainly not approximately so electrifying as Churchill. But he had messages of no less magnitude and cheer. "We may confidently rely on the ultimate success of the Allies in the west," he said simply. "But we want more men and still more men. We have now a million and a quarter in training."

But it was Asquith's peroration, at which my impressionistic sketch in _The Daily Mail_ only hinted, which was the nugget of the night.

Englishmen still repeat it as something which puts in more terse and concrete words than anybody else has clothed it the solemn spirit in which they have consecrated themselves to the task now trying the Empire's soul:

"It is going to be a long, drawn-out struggle. But we shall not sheathe the sword until Belgium recovers all, and more than all, she has sacrificed; until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression; until the rights of smaller nations are placed on an una.s.sailable foundation; until the military domination of Prussia is finally destroyed."

It was in that incorrigible resolve that Britain entered upon the second calendar year of war, bleeding uncomplainingly, losing stoically, taking what came and ruing it not; determined as she lived, to keep on until her vow to herself was vindicated and her duty to civilization performed.